Rob Kall: Now I've got to say, when I talk to kids
going to college, I say "Don't look for a job that can be outsourced by the
internet." Even radiologists are being
outsourced.; so if you get an x-ray, they send the results to India to have a
radiologist in India do it instead of an American doctor doing it. It's so
scary.

Paul Craig
Roberts: Yep.

Rob Kall: You wrote in your article When Truth Is
Suppressed, Countries Die - the first half of the article is mostly about
this topic, about how theorists were saying that we would be transitioning to
an information economy, and did the creative approaches and what have you, and
what you argued was that you've got to have production; you have to have
manufacturing, or if you lose that, you're in big trouble. I wanted your comment, and I just think that
it also ties into the space program, which both parties are just throwing away
and selling off and getting rid of now, and letting India and China and every
other country pick up on.

It seems to me like -- I've been saying it for a while now: the US is
being strip-mined, and they're basically just going through us, and we're going
to be left a third world country, which you've written a lot about. Talk a little bit about that and
globalization too, because this is all tied in to corporate globalization. I've just thrown a lot at you; pick whatever
you want to talk about from it.

Paul Craig
Roberts: OK Rob. It's certainly the case that innovation
follows manufacturing. If you're not
manufacturing things, you're out of touch, and you don't know what to innovate,
or how to innovate. So the kind of
arguments that we got from the shills for global corporations (like Michael
Porter at Harvard, all of these people paid to come up with phony studies to
reassure Americans that they weren't really losing anything by closing down the
manufacturing sector), the argument they made was: "OK, look. These are 'dirty fingernail' jobs, and we
don't need them. We are now going to all
be white collar workers doings intellectual work innovating! We'll be doing all the innovations, and the
Chinese will have the dirty fingernail jobs of producing the products that we
innovate.

This was the Line, this was the "New Economy" that they talked
about. Of course it was all just
baloney! Because, as I said (to repeat myself), if you're not making
things, you don't know what to innovate.
You get out of touch with technologies.
You become a Third World Country.
We now see from all the surveys that increasingly, American corporations
innovate outside the country where their offshore plants are. And we recently had a report from twenty [20]
MIT professors who were aided by the graduate students, so we had twenty
professors at MIT who have issued a report that we've lost the ability to
innovate, or we're, in the process, about lost, because things that are made
aren't made here, and so we've lost the ability to innovate. So I see that as vindication. I've been warning about this for years, and
this study, it was recently reported out in the last month or two, I think.

The other point I've been making for a
decade about offshore production is not free trade, it's labor arbitrage; and
that all tradable goods and services can be moved offshore. So that you can very easily have a permanent
unemployment rate of 25% or 35% percent or even higher, because the only jobs
that can't be offshored require hands-on performance: like going to the
dentist, or getting your hair cut, or being served in a restaurant by a
waitress, or in a bar by a bartender.
Those kinds of jobs are the only ones that can't be offshored, and so -

Rob Kall: Paul, can you just describe what you mean by
arbitrage? I think it's usually a word
used to talk about the stock market.
What does it mean, and how does it apply in terms of jobs?

Paul Craig
Roberts: It means the same things as in
the stock market if there is a difference in price. In the case of labor arbitrage, the price is
labor. So if the American manufacturing
worker costs $22 an hour (with all the benefits, and so forth), and the Chinese
at the time this started cost 25c an hour (laughs), you have an amazing labor
cost difference. And so they look at
this and they say: "Well, wow! We could
really drop our cost of production by producing with this Chinese labor,
because instead of twenty-five bucks an hour, it's twenty five cents." That's what we mean by labor arbitrage. They just say, "OK, we're not hiring these
Americans, we're going to hire the Chinese."
That's labor arbitrage, and it has nothing whatsoever to do, nothing is
being traded.

There's no free trade, there's no any kind of trade, it's just labor
arbitrage. It's just like if somebody in
the stock market sees a difference in pricing somewhere, they move quickly to
take advantage of it. Now they use these
extremely high speed computers to try to get in front of trades, and they trade
on nano-pennies in nanoseconds. So
that's what the labor arbitrage means.
Now let me finish this story. As
I warned for a decade, the job offshoring was undermining employment
opportunities in the United States, and certainly had stopped the rise in
consumer income.

Well, two years ago, the Nobel Economist Michael Spence did the same
studies that I've done, and came to the same conclusion. It was published (I think) as a Council For
Foreign Relations paper. He said the
same things that I've said, that the United States faces a hell of an
employment challenge, because so much has been moved off, and so much more can
be. The main function of globalism is to
de-industrialize high-wage countries that are developed.

The other main result of globalism is to turn lesser developed
countries that had viable agriculture and were self-sustaining, to turn them
into monocultures; supplying like one crop for global markets, and then that
makes them -- first of all, that destroys the economic-social systems there, and
people now are dependent on food imports.
The big farms, of course, haven't room for much of the population that
used to be on sustainable farms. So
globalism is a wrecking force of amazing power to wreck. It doesn't do anything good except for
shareholders of big corporations and their managers, or chief executives.

Rob Kall: Now, in your new book, The Failure of
Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, you write,
"Globalism and financial concentration have destroyed the justifications of
market capitalism. Corporations that
have become too big to fail are sustained by public subsidies, thus destroying
Capitalism's claim to be an efficient allocator of resources." When you talk about globalism, I think you're
talking about corporate globalism, which is basically the only globalism we
have. Am I right on that?

Paul Craig
Roberts: Yeah, sure. What they mean by globalism is the total free
movement across national borders of capital and production, so that -

Rob Kall: In a sense, by creating this corporate
Globalism system that we have now, we have a system where corporatism
transcends the power and the Democracy of nations! Isn't that true?

Paul Craig
Roberts: Yeah, right. Well we've seen that, haven't we; in Greece,
Italy, and now Cyprus. Remember when the
Greek bailout was up, and the Greek Prime Minister or President said, "OK, I'm
going to put it to vote"? And the EU
said, "No you aren't! The people don't
get to decide. You resign right
now." And then they appointed from
outside, they appointed the government of Greece. And they did the same thing to Italy! The Italian Prime Minister or President or
whatever they call him wasn't elected, he was appointed by the EU bankers.

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.